Monday, December 08, 2008

Just follow me on this, OK?

History will prove that George W. Bush is one of the most environmentally-friendly presidents ever.

How?

Now I'm not talking about his actual environmental policies, Lord knows he favors industry and even drilling and lower EPA guidelines around national parks. No. I'm talking about his economic policies! Here's how it goes:

Bush favors pretty much no regulation whatsoever. Whatever the industry is. He's a real free-market kind of guy, letting the market do pretty much whatever it damn well pleases.

As a result, lenders started letting people buy houses using this whole subprime mortgage deal, where the consumers bought houses that they obviously could not afford, that they simply had no business buying in the first place, by paying lower monthly mortgage payments. Of course, all along, lenders did almost no credit checks on those buyers. Why would they? Greed and the quick buck make you do stupid things.

Little did those people know, that after a very short time, their interest rates would skyrocket, because that's how those subprime mortgages worked. They were adjustable after a short period of time, and not fixed over a long period of time. Besides, just like in the above point, they could not afford those houses in the first place.

Lenders started packaging those subprime mortgages and selling them to banks as assets. Banks being greedy enough to buy them because they believed they would make a killing off of those mortgages when the interest rates rose.

Here what they didn't think of, that people could no longer pay off the mortgages on those houses that they bought. The monthly payments skyrocketed. People started losing their houses. Banks started to foreclose on those same houses.

Then all hell broke loose! The housing market crashed because there weren't enough buyers, and the market was saturated from all those foreclosed homes. The credit market crashed, because now lenders were starting to lose money because of all the foreclosures and loan defaults. Then Wall Street started its downward spiral because of the housing and credit market crises.

What happened then was that the economy began its faceplant. People weren't spending their money because they were afraid they were going to get laid off and lose their jobs. Manufacturers and service providers started to lose money because there was no spending. Companies did start laying off thousands of workers. Household budgets got even tighter and tighter. Unemployment rose to their lowest marks in decades. It was chaos everywhere.

So, as all this was happening, industry began to slow down, since demand was really, really down. With the industry slowing down, a lot of plants started to shut down.

And since a lot of those plants were anyway in China and India, and since most of the pollution cam from countries like China and India where there are no environmental regulations to contend with, pollution should start easing up.

Here's what should happen next: more and more plants would shut down, in places like China and India and Taiwan and Mexico and so on. Pollution rates would start to decrease. The environment would start to recover, Global Warming would start to reverse course, the Ozone layer would start to patch itself up, and life on planet Earth would become more abundant, and Human Beings healthier, in the long run.

Ah, if only things were that simple!

So, Bush should get a couple of awards and maybe even a Nobel prize for what he did to the environment, because of his economic plans!